In working towards ways of reading Mann, so that his own advances in suggesting new perspectives will become more vivid, I do some fairly standard philosophical analysis of ideas in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

In ethics, we don't make progress by discovering pre-existent truths; we do so by solving problems.

So my methodological approach is to draw on many different features in highlighting different facets of the novella (and the opera and the film).

So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.

Refined religion is aimed at realizing ethical values, including the fostering of human lives and human communities.

I'm very suspicious of the idea of a "final theory" in natural science, and the thought of a complete system of ethical rules seems even more dubious.

The point of philosophy, as I see it, is to change thinking, and thereby to change the conversation.